Friday 31st January 2014

Today was quite a busy day and the first thing I got stuck into this morning was the monthly report and once I had this knocked out I then had to do the monthly fire chief report. Somewhere in between I got ARPANSA done and in the afternoon I repaired my manual antenna tuner. I replaced the two germanium diodes that got fried by static electricity during the dry blizzard. I also cleaned up the roller inductor as best I could then took it down to the transmitter building where I tested it and calibrated the forward and reverse power meters. Tonight was fish & chip night and later we watched a Johnny Depp movie called Blow.

Mawson January 2014 Climate Summary.

During January we recorded the highest max temperature for the year at +8.3°C
We also had the most hours of sunshine for the year with a total of 286.4 hours

Temperatures - at Mawson during January we expect: A mean maximum temperature of 02.5°C

The average maximum for the month was +3.6°C. The lowest maximum was –1.8°C and the highest +8.3°C.

A mean minimum temperature of -02.7°C. The average minimum for the month was -02.1°C. The lowest minimum was -07.3°C and the highest 02.0°C.

The coldest temperature for any January day on record at Mawson was -10.0°C on 31/01/1994.

Wind

The average daily wind run (the measure of how many kilometres of wind pass the station in 24 hours) was 687 km per day for the month. This is well below the long term average of 778 km per day.

The maximum wind gust for January was 120 km/h from the SE recorded on the 4th. The record gust for January is 198 km/h recorded on 11/01/1998.

No blizzards occurred during the month, with 0.6 events expected

There were 17 gales compared to 8.9 expected for the month, 25 days of strong wind, with 24.9 the average. 2 days of snowfall were observed, which is way less than the expected average of 6.9 days. We had no days of Blowing Snow (Vis <1km).

Note: A Strong Wind day has wind in excess of 41 km/h and a Gale is wind in excess of 63 km/h.

Sunshine

We recorded a total of 286.4 hours of sunshine for the month.
The long term average is 257.3 hours.

Conclusion
                                  

	January 2013	January 2014	Long Term Mean
Temp max highest	04.0 °C	08.3 °C	10.6 °C 9/01/74
Temp max average	02.1 °C	03.6 °C	02.5 °C
Temp Min lowest	-08.1 °C	-07.3 °C	-10.0 °C 31/1/94
Temp Min average	-02.5 °C	-02.1 °C	-02.7 °C
Wind run	36,606 km	21,284 km	24118 km
Max wind speed in kph	150 kph	120 kph	198 kph 11/1/98
Hours of sunshine	136.4 Hrs	286.4 Hrs	257.3 Hrs
Days of snow	7	2	6.9
Days of Strong Wind	30	25	24.9
Days of Gale	22	17	8.9
Days of Blowing Snow	7	0	NA
Days of Blizzard	3	0	0.3

January was milder, had way less wind and more hours of sunshine compared to the long term mean.